


Stoa Basileios

by vespirus



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Dialogue, Dialogue Heavy, Ethical Dilemmas, Ethics, Gen, Moral Ambiguity, Moral Dilemmas, Morality, Philosophy, in the style of a plato dialogue, legal references, read on if you enjoy clinical discussions of ethical differences
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-28
Updated: 2018-10-28
Packaged: 2019-08-08 18:12:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,557
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16434344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vespirus/pseuds/vespirus
Summary: - And are you about to use violence, without even going through the forms of justice?- Yes, I shall use violence, he replied, since he orders me; and therefore you had better consider well.- But the time for consideration has passed, I said, when violence is employed; and you, when you are determined on anything, and in the mood of violence, are irresistible.- Do not you resist me then, he said.- I will not resist you, I replied.Charmides, or Temperanceby Plato, written 380 B.C.E, translated by Benjamin Jowett





	Stoa Basileios

**Author's Note:**

> really wanted to do this, i just got into dd these last few weeks and found it super interesting the seemingly fundamental moral differences between foggy and matt when they're seemingly the closest & especially foggy is one of matt's most important people. especially since foggy reflects a LOT of my views on the legal system and how it works that i've thought about a lot especially now i'm planning on moving towards law school and becoming an attorney.
> 
> i spent a bunch of time and effort on this and i hope someone at least will appreciate it :') if there's any more points you would like to see addressed or have any questions or anything else, feel free to comment! i read all my comments and i love them all so much <3
> 
> the stoa basileios, aka the royal stoa, is where copies of the city law of athens were kept along with where certain legal actions would take place. the front steps of the stoa is the setting for the euthyphro dialogue. i'd totally recommend reading the euthyphro dialogue by plato btw, it talks about what is piety and what makes something pious and is interesting to think of re: matt and his catholocism.

Matt has his views and Foggy has his and it feels like there’s a giant chasm between the two, insurmountable, and just looking down into the canyon reminds Foggy why he’s bothered by heights. He really doesn’t even know Matt.

Even if all those moments, the drunk conversations and smiles and laughs and silent studying, were real… As ‘real’ as things can be when one party has such heightened senses and the other is oblivious… His whole view of Matt has shifted.

He thought he had him pegged. Not in a bad way, just that he knew who his friend was and how he thought and operated. He thought he understood him. His obsession with Thurgood Marshall, opening Nelson and Murdock, the occasional late night conversation about why they wanted to go into law… It had all stacked up into one portrait of Matthew Murdock. A zealous advocate, one who stands up for the little guy, who twists the system to work in his favor and makes the law do what it should and bring justice for all. A kid hero turned orphan turned avid advocate. A man who saw the flawed system and learned it and used it for good. Made the world a better place by using the conniving lawyer tricks for people who needed help.

But instead he just does secret polygraphs on everyone and sneaks out at night to beat the shit out of people he’s deemed bad.

So it seems all Foggy’s talk about why the law is important because no one person can make the decisions of what is good and what is bad and what punishment someone deserves back in their law school days went in one ear and out the other. Heightened senses maybe, but he still can’t seem to hear what people are  saying to his face.

Sometimes he thinks about what he could’ve said differently. There’s nothing he would have said differently, of course, but. In another world. Separate from time, and anger and betrayal and all those sick clawing feelings that made them shout and cry. Where they could sit down and talk without one of them getting too defensive, where they wouldn’t get wound tighter and tighter throughout the conversation until they snapped again. Like one of those dialogues he had to learn to read in his ethics intro class.

They’d sit there, in that fucking empty room. Everything broken and jumbled from some fight Matt hasn’t told him about. Matt laying on the couch looking like a piece of meat, raw and bloody like the cuts in the freezer at the job he had with a butcher in high school. Black stitches standing out against bruises overlayed on a too-pale sick pallor. Blood streaked over his face and body. Foggy can still feel the disgusting tacky sticky feeling of it on his hands some days.

And they would talk.

 

**Persons of the dialogue**

MATTHEW

FOGGY

 

**Scene**

Matt’s apartment.

 

**Foggy** . I know you’re the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen. Why would you do this? Why do you continually put yourself not only in physical danger, but mental and legal danger as well?

**Matthew** . I have to. Hell’s Kitchen needs me. There are people out there who can’t be helped by the law, but I can help them.

**Fog** . Why must violence be the answer to the question of helping someone?

**Matt** . These people, they won’t understand anything else. The only language they know is violence. I do what I must to get the answers I need to help others, and to stop people from hurting others.

**Fog** . You use violence as a positive punishment to encourage cooperation from others, whether through providing information or ceasing harmful activities. Operant conditioning is a very slippery slope, though. By hurting a man who hurt another, you’re telling him that if he hurts others, he will be hurt. Not made to understand why hurt is wrong, but instead taught that hurt is acceptable if used for the right reasons. You’re not guiding him to any other courses of action other than repressing certain desired actions and leaving him without an alternative option instead of simply ‘nothing’.

**Matt** . To sit idle is as true an option as action is.

**Fog** . Not when you are the instigator of the proposed action and you are put off performing it not of your own free will. You may have saved someone today, but you have not saved the one who suffers later when the suppressed feelings eventually surface again and with more concentrated emotion. How can you continue such a course of action when you know you may be putting more in danger by saving one today?

**Matt** . In the moment of injustice, one has to act. One cannot sit idly by and watch chaos and evil reign. So often am I the only one who can see these moments, I know I must act. To not do so would be against my moral duty, and when I stop the evil actions of another I know it will not be continued for the moment, and I will stop it again if it happens again.

**Fog** . You cannot always be there.

**Matt** . But when I am there, I make a difference. That is one more saved who otherwise would not be.

**Fog** . What of when you die? Will another take up the mantle of the Devil to continue your work, or will the Devil fade into history while chaos runs rampant once more and crime increases because of a police force that’s grown incompetent and complacent from their work taken care of and so unused to doing it themselves and a legal system that’s stagnated and become a dusty book of rules to fall back on that are dated and yet unchanged because of reliance on outside forces?

**Matt** . After my death is time outside my reach. I will do what I can with the time I have, and nothing more. I am not capable of assuring things outside my control and I won’t pretend to be. I act upon duty alone to protect those I can. Moral obligation is simply a fact of acting or not, doing what you must or not. It is not about future repercussions or long-term planning, it is of the moment. It simply is, and you must live by it or not.

**Fog** . I see. I understand, in a way. I do not agree with your priorities but I know why you think as you do.

**Matt** . Thank you.

**Fog** . Why did you lie to me, my friend? This was not a snap decision made in the moment, but instead was an ongoing farce. Every moment you knew and I did not, you chose to hide this from me. Every time you were injured and I asked why, every time you used your senses and I asked how you were capable of such a thing. Instead of saving me from one hurt you kept hurting me every second you lied to me.

**Matt** . I knew that if I told you, you could become a target. To do so would be exposing you to future hurts much worse than the sting of betrayal. The Devil cannot have loved ones, or they would become a liability and an easy heart string to pluck to elicit a response. This would weaken the Devil and put you in ongoing danger.

**Fog** . You cannot say how much the betrayal you conduct stings for those affected. Were I a target, could I not be protected? The same manner you protect those you’ve saved once who may suffer later from the postponed evil.

**Matt** . I suppose.

**Fog** . And even if I did not know, I am still close to you and so if your identity were discovered by another, I would still be a target and be in more danger because I would be unaware of it and unprepared. Knowing Matthew but not knowing the Devil cannot be a distinction in the case of those close being targets, because even knowing who the Devil is does not make me any more outwardly obvious to others as being close to the Devil than it did before I knew and we worked together.

**Matt** . Perhaps.

**Fog** . If the Devil was ever caught and revealed, both I and others such as Karen would be under investigation and assumed to know of your activities whether we did or did not, because of our association. While it would be the truth we did not know, the truth would not help us in that case. You have said yourself, this world is not fair. The truth does not hold as much power as it should. There would be no real difference between knowing and not knowing in the eyes of the law, because it would be assumed I was lying.

**Matt** . There are ways to bring truth into the court.

**Fog** . The use of a polygraph as evidence is forbidden throughout New York state, as you well know. Which brings us to another point: you rely heavily upon the detection of heartbeats and other physiological factors to detect falsehood, do you not?

**Matt** . Falsehood, among other things, yes.

**Fog** . That is what a polygraph does, is it not?

**Matt** . It is.

**Fog** . Having studied law, we both know a polygraph is inadmissible and the results can be inaccurate or faulty. There are many issues that arise when depending on it to tell truth from lies – too many factors play into someone’s physiological responses that do not have to do with if they are lying or not, and you may be seeing lies from those who are truthful.

**Matt** . It has been said that it is not the polygraph that is the problem, but the reliability of the interpreter. I have lived with this power for many years, and know how to read it much better than even the best of polygraph testers.

**Fog** . Perhaps. But even then, there will be problems; reading truth from those who are comfortable in their lies or those who believe a falsehood because they are telling the truth but it is not the fact. Is that not true?

**Matt** . It is true.

**Fog** . It may be helpful, but it is not a power to base all choices and trust upon. An interpretation of a man’s heartbeat in the heat of the moment when not only he but you as well are not thinking completely clearly is not something to stake a life on.

**Matt** . I can keep a clear head under pressure.

**Fog** . That is not for only you to decide. That goes into another problem here: it is not for only you to decide. Not only the readings you get or the validity of them, but the moral lines of who deserves what.

**Matt** . I do not claim to be perfect. I go after those who are outrageously immoral – the choice is akin to that of what constitutes outrageous government conduct. It is not the judgement of one man but of the universal sense of justice.

**Fog** . That is still a frustratingly vague litmus test. What can you call the universal sense of justice? It is fact that all societies have had different moral lines. Do you believe in objective morality, then?

**Matt** . As sure as I believe in God.

**Fog** . So you base your morality on Catholic ideals?

**Matt** . That is the framework they are established within, yes.

**Fog** . But they branch out from that with your own opinions.

**Matt** . Yes.

**Fog** . So you have picked your own set of morals and now purport they are fact and use them to carry out your own judgements and punish others when they go against your decisions of what is right and wrong.

**Matt** . Yes. But is that not what we all do? Every person judges others by their own moral code, even if they claim to be objective. I believe mine are objective truth. So do many other with different morals. You cannot scorn me alone for what is common practice and accepted societal fact.

**Fog** . That is true. But within society, the one you and I exist and move in together, we have accepted that there are societal values that emerge from personal ones. The legal system is a testament to our agreement of that. It says that for one man to judge another for going against the law – in essence, against the societal moral code – to the point of punishment such as you carry out, is immoral. It is not a system that should be supported, and goes against fundamental ideas our society is built upon. You cannot be judge, jury, and executioner.

**Matt** . There are many times when one man makes that decision. The existence of bench trials and a term for that concept shows that.

**Fog** . Yes, but in a bench trial it has been made clear beforehand that the defendant agreed to waive their right to a jury.

**Matt** . That is true. But there are still so many places that the legal system doesn’t work. The people I go after are those who the law has failed to apprehend. Some of them have been through a trial but were found to be not guilty because of either negligence of the state or deliberate manipulation.

**Fog** . That may be true, but it is not for you to decide or to act upon in such a manner.

**Matt** . Then who will?

**Fog** . You do not have to hold the world up by your shoulders alone, friend. There are systems in place to support you, to help you, to take care of these issues and leave us all with a better future without resorting to violence.

**Matt** . If I do not act, then no one else will. I will not be caught up in the bystander effect.

**Fog** . You know there are ways to combat that without going to such violent means. Not every hurt in the world has you at fault. You are not responsible for the wellbeing of every single resident of Hell’s Kitchen. It is but an arbitrary line you’ve drawn for yourself and stepped up to the mantle of without needing to.

**Matt** . I am needed. I was needed before though Hell’s Kitchen did not know it, and if I step down my absence shall be palpable and they will know what is missing.

**Fog** . Does it not hurt?

**Matt** . What?

**Fog** . Living like this. Surrounding yourself with violence and deceit. Such a thing can poison a man’s mind. We have seen such effects on you – you lash out physically to those you see as having wronged you or others you feel a responsibility towards, you hide yourself away and lie to those closest to you. It is a dangerous ploy to take up the tactics of those you oppose and then act like you are not affected by it.

**Matt** . These are the prices I pay for what I must do. Every person I save is one person who was not saved before I acted. No matter what, I know I have acted in the right because a human life has been saved.

**Fog** . The number of lives saved in the short term is not the only measure of morality.

**Matt** . Perhaps. But it is how I measure mine.


End file.
